Tag: inspiration

Writing Prompt

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Writing5 Comments

I have been attempting to take part in Madison Woods organized Friday Fictioneers which has been very enjoyable and a fantastic exercise – particularly to see the many figments of minds operating on a singular prompt – how various persons / how various world!  I came across this sentence standing on its own in the midst of a story by Lynne Tillman recently and it just will not leave my head.  I thought “a picture is worth a thousand words!?” – how about “these words are worth a billion pictures!?”  I’m sharing them here hoping they might also inspire in many of you reams of stories…And I’d love to receive links to the works that you create with/in/from them – any length, any time.  Here’s the sentence:

“In an embrace, something may be confirmed, avoided, or resolved.”

-Lynne Tillman from her story “Phantoms” in This is Not It–

Sunday Sustenance

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, UncategorizedLeave a comment

conversations with my wife (www.lifeinrelationtoart.wordpress.com & www.ekphrastixarts.com)

and all accompanied by:

Sigur Ros’ relatively new “Valtari” album

hope your day is great!

A resonance in technical difficulties

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading2 Comments

“Writing is for me a means of modulating and organizing phenomenal and circumstantial information from all points of experience, a process I refer to as ‘tuning’ myself.  As I grow older and seemingly remove myself from unity with any singular, or even plural, socio-cultural environment, I seem more ‘on my own’ in a vast environment of internalized experience.  My approach to poetics has become the search for responses and behavioral modes relative to this experience, to surviving it as well as conditioning myself to it.  Constantly the effort seems to be away from any formalization of ideas or structure or definitive process and towards a rejuvenating line of ‘basics’, that mythical point where each process is fresh and new and wholly responsive to indigenous conditions…

“In a sense, I am trying to cope with the urge of poetry as opposed to the structure of it.  This urge seems to lie within the rooted and individual beginnings of the activity, centered on a meditative, self-encoded embrace of those issues and inclinations I find within my own humanness.  The intention therefore becomes the opening of experience toward a continual address of the self”

-Craig Watson-

in

New Arrivals…New Invaluables

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Photography, Poetry, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

“meant to detect just how slushed our insides were from too much speech, how blighted we’d become from the language toxin…

The know-it-alls are always the last to know.  Everyone’s a diagnostician, and everyone’s wrong…”

-Ben Marcus-

“As is usual with me I would not go on with the rest of the story and come back to the difficult sentence later.  With others it may be different – but when I am that far in a work the story must exist in each word or I cannot go on…”

-Louis Zukofsky-

-Lukas Felzmann-

I know….there’s a LOT of envy fuming out of you readers eyes!

(use your local library!)

Thoughts

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, Traces, Writing1 Comment

“No useless chatter, but a word of necessity face to face with itself.

With this word, I have written my books.

Word of sand.  Word of eternity.

Thoughts of shipwreck, but also of haven.”

“To approach silence before the silent sign.

To approach the book before the page.

To wait for words that wake our thoughts as they write us.”

-Edmond Jabes-

“When a sparrow feels the freezing cold air, he puffs up his feathers and gathers his feet under his body;

he bears the surrounding cold by countering it with his inner warmth.

The writer, who is also warm-blooded, fights even harder”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

“The bow’s harmony arises from the strained stick forced by the bow-string.

Subsequently, harmony resides in unity and contradiction.

It is kinetic energy that’s about to become dynamic energy.”

2 Sources

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

Breathlessly discovering these treasure troves of inspiration and encouragement (and great thinking!):

M/E/A/N/I/N/G (particularly examine the essay by Lucio Pozzi – 12 Questions of Art – amazing!)

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

“Art, to me, is nothing but a testimony of a flow where order and disorder are interchangeable

and where the darkness of inspiration and desire fulfill unknown purposes within the appearance of space and time”

-Lucio Pozzi-

Living Traces – Paul Valery

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Philosophy, Poetry, Traces, Writing4 Comments

“In the strange faculty of doing certain things irrelevant to life with as much care, passion and persistence as if one’s life depended on them…there we find what is called ‘living.'”

-Paul Valery-

Writing Exorcise?

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing6 Comments

The Textures of Other

Whatever your age when reading this, I’m asking you to remember.

It’s an experiment beggaring proof.

Find a comfortable position and setting – a favorite chair and drink, your all-time essential musical accompaniment, the woods, a mountain, a porch.  Wherever it is, whatever the surround that most allows you to relax, let go, and drift.

Don’t think, exactly, just breathe and attend.  Float or lie down.  Allow your torso to lead.  Feel your legs, your shoulders, the back of your head – sense them with your mind.

Once all of you feels reprieve, you’re under no specific pressures, these moments are free and they belong to you.  You’re not dead yet, not needed anywhere, whatever pains you feel are truly part of your reality, NOW.  Close your eyes, gently.  Hear the air traveling into your nose, and quietly, slowly, exhale.

Be soft.  Be silent.  Be held.  NOW.  Notice a finger curled on a cup, an ankle or toe moving to or fro – give them a break, let them stop awhile.  Be still.  Allow your lungs, your heart, to keep time alive.

Good.  Stay.  Just be – you – sitting/lying/leaning/standing, wherever you are, hearing what you hear, touching where you touch, smelling, feeling your mouth with your tongue… rest.

Now drift: float over, stroll, swim, whatever is easiest for you, carefully, openly, gently back into your years.  Begin here or with your earliest memories…anywhere…

What are they made of?

Colors?  Sounds?  Sights?  Faces?  Places?  all of these?  Examine on, calmly.  Are they combinatory?  An edge of a counter in a childhood kitchen, your mother’s back at sink or stove, a glinting sun through a window?  The weight of your first tiny child in your lap, your forearms and fingers cradling its downy skull?  The tumult of a raft on rapids, against boulders, rush and foam?  The excited terror of walking the steps to preschool, or path to college dorm?  Your grandfather pale in coffin?

Where do you go?  What comes?  Do you still hear earth-thudding booms of ammunition?  Wails of the bleeding faces dying?  A friend’s laughter, your own, good tears?  Slaps of fists, warmth of hugs, wet of kisses?

How many bare arms caress your naked body?  Whose?  Can you smell their skin?

First mountain-view.  First foreign city.  First flown kite.  First Christmas recalled.  A sibling.  A parent.  A pet.  Be there, each where and when, touch in.

Where are they?  Can you hear voices?  Whispers?  In moments you were celebrated – does your chest still jitter?  Play favorites.  Go for good.  Relive, as it were, whatever you consider joy.

What’s it like?

What are you viewing?  What do you “feel”?  What might it “mean”?

Remember.

Stay relaxed if you can.  Walk the empty morning pasture alone.  Recall bonfires, ocean winds, swingsets, music.  Dream revisitations.

I’d love to know what you’re finding, how you are.  Take your time – these are yours.

Reach into the textures.  The moments belong.

 

Now hope.

And renew.

We get to.

 

Reminder…

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces, Writing3 Comments

    “”I write.”  This statement is the one and only real “datum” a writer can start from.  “At this moment I am writing.”  Which is also the same as saying: “You who are reading are obliged to believe only one thing: that what you are reading is something that at some previous time someone has written; what you are reading takes place in one particular world, that of the written word.  It may be that likenesses can be established between the world of the written word and other worlds of experience, and that you will be called upon to judge upon these likenesses, but your judgment would in any case be wrong if while reading you hoped to enter into a direct relationship with the experience of worlds other than that of the written word.”  I have spoken of “worlds of experience,’ not of “levels of reality,” because within the world of the written word one can discern many levels of reality, as in any other world of experience.”

-Italo Calvino-

p.s….

“A work of literature might be defined as an operation carried out in the written language and involving several layers of reality at the same time”

“The preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work”

(further Calvino’s)

Affinities : Possessing the Wordless

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Journallings, Traces, Writing4 Comments

The following quotations are from “Putting Down Marks (my life as a draftsman)” by Jim Dine.  Where he uses “draw” or “drawing” substitute “write” or “writing” and I find a remarkable similarity with my own experience making things…I find his work and thought quite inspiring to my own and wanted to share with you many writers/artists/thinkers…

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

“I’ve always had a wish to put down  marks”

“My mind was going and so was my hand”

“I love building up, erasing, losing it, bringing it back, taking it away.  I trust my method of not trusting”

“He’s always so frightened of failure and of finishing, and that moves me” (of Giacometti)

“But what is really the optimal situation for me is to get my brain around what I’m trying to do.  That’s all.”

“I have a total connection between my hand and my eye – it’s just that I can’t see sometimes”

“Drawing is not an exercise.  Exercise is sitting on a stationary bicycle and going nowhere.  Drawing is being on a bicycle and taking a journey.  For me to succeed in drawing, I must go fast and arrive somewhere.  The quest is to keep the thing alive – “

“I’m interested in making a vehicle within which it is possible to feel certain things…And these emotions don’t have words.  They really don’t”

“I want to get my drawing out of my heart the way photography accesses my marginal thoughts and images”

“The state of wanting to draw something, for me, is a way to capture it and that’s a primary emotion for me.”

“I want to possess them and what better way of possessing them than to draw them.  The reason I wanted to possess them is they reminded me of other things that are wordless”

“Drawing is the medium which has been the blood of my life”

THANK YOU JIM DINE!